Growing up in a dominant society where the appropriation of my culture has become a sort of fad, having the raw and honest reality of our diasporic experiences performed is invaluable. Yoni Ki Baat is a medium in which we can begin to address our problems, and value the struggles of our womyn.
—Swati (personal correspondence, 2011)
In the United States today, consumer culture often fuels the multicultural attraction to everyday “ethnic” performances. Nose rings, mendhi tattoos, belly chains, and bindis—these traditional fashions associated with South Asian American women can now be found in most mainstream shopping centers as stylish accessories. Over the years, traditional styles from Asia have become popular in international fashion. Most recently, in large public venues, celebrities like Madonna or Katy Perry showcase these appropriated ethnic markers of identity to position themselves as “citizens of the world.”
Consequently, it is understandable that during my fieldwork, I interviewed many young South Asian American women, like Swati, who found that having their cultural traditions co-opted was more than simply disconcerting.1 Rather, these cultural appropriations complicated for them what it means to be affiliated with an ethnic community. Interestingly, many women felt that the process of co-opting these everyday cultural performances and turning them into commercial fads is historically informed by the West’s sexual objectification of women from the East. They argued it is a consumptive appetite that has grown, in part, out of mainstream media and popular culture’s fascination with harem girls or the Kama Sutra. Scholars have also criticized “Asian chic” for “perpetuating Oriental structures of knowledge and power” that reinforce stereotypes of Asians as timeless and traditional (Leshkowich and Jones 2003, 281).
Madison Yoni Ki Baat poster. Photo credited to Madison Yoni ki Baat directors, poster by James Ahoy.
In contrast to such mainstream appropriations, across the United States, there is a growing number of young South Asian American women who have found other, more progressive and politically resistive ways to engage with South Asian cultural traditions. Playing critically with folk dress, narratives, songs, poetic forms, dance, and material culture, these women engage in debates about sexuality and gender in their communities. This chapter offers an ethnographic account of one such emerging movement—a feminist performance movement called Yoni Ki Baat (Our Vaginas Speak).
Characterized as a South Asian American version of The Vagina Monologues, these performances offer young women an opportunity to embed personal testimonies within traditional cultural forms in order to address controversial issues connected to ethnic essentialism, sex positivity, and sexual violence, to name but a few. Yoni Ki Baat began as a single performance event by the South Asian Sisters. Recently, it has grown into a movement that has spread from coast to coast, involving women’s collectives with diverse agendas and compositions.
In the process, Yoni Ki Baat performances have become an important part of broader efforts for South Asian American feminist activism. Since the early 1980s, a diverse range of South Asian women’s organizations have been founded in the United States (Gupta 2006). Forging inroads into the public sphere, these groups confronted stereotypes of Asian women and proposed new models of advocacy and community service (Khandelwal 1995). As Mohanty (2003) notes, these women found strength not only in their commonality but in their diversity and differences as well. This appreciation for the complex relationality and intersectionality that shapes South Asian women’s lives certainly is apparent in the ways these women have sought to understand notions of “feminism,” “gender,” or “sexuality” in diasporic contexts. This awareness also can be observed in the issues and exigencies South Asian women’s organizations chose to focus upon; for most, domestic abuse, wage discrimination, or immigrant law reform have been areas of deep concern.
Director of South Asian Sisters, Vandana. Photo courtesy of Vandana Maaker.
In this sense, growing out of a third-wave feminist orientation, South Asian Sisters offers a unique agenda. Unlike many South Asian women’s organizations, they focus their attention upon issues related to both sexual violence and sex positivity and do so by drawing upon situated and personal sets of experiences. Their activism manifests in many ways, from sponsoring community discussion forums to designing a feminist Web log. One of their most distinctive contributions is their annual performance of Yoni Ki Baat, which they first conceived and staged in 2003. As Vandana Makker observes, “The yoni (Sanskrit word for ‘vagina’) has long been held sacred in Hindu mythology, but, through years of patriarchy and colonialism, it has rarely been allowed to speak its mind. In 2003, South Asian Sisters, a collective of progressive desi (of Indian origin) women, decided that the yoni needed a chance to get on stage and tell its side of the story. Thus, ‘Yoni ki Baat’ was born” (Bhargqva 2012) This event, I argue, meets several important objectives, that extend from providing a distinctly South Asian perspective upon “women’s issues,” to exploring diverse experiences of sexuality, to reflecting upon different ways of relating compassionately to those in the community who need support.
That is, though Eve Ensler’s piece—The Vagina Monologues—“has been performed around the world, including Pakistan and India, South Asian Sisters felt that putting on a production of the original show simply wasn’t enough” (Makker 2004, 1). They needed to create a space in which South Asian women could express their own views on sexuality and their bodies—“topics that are traditionally kept ‘hush-hush’ in desi culture” (Makker 2004, 1). In the process, Yoni Ki Baat bridges divisions between religion, class, and immigrant status to create a forum that gathers women for political reasons—creating spaces for women that are women friendly to name what is often culturally unspeakable.2
However, an intertwining objective is for South Asian women to explore and express their diverse experiences of sexuality, in their own terms, as diasporic community members. In some cases, their discourses revolve around issues of sexual identity. In other performances, women speak about different dimensions of their sexuality, openly exploring sex-positive attitudes and sharing their personal experiences with fantasy, orgasm, masturbation, and other forms of sexual desire and the erotic. Through autobiographical testimonies, these women delve into a variety of issues important to their lives and communities. I believe these narratives call for attention for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that “research examining how desire is actually conveyed through language in social life is rare” (Cameron and Kulick 2003, 108).
Yet, it seems important to grant that some of the same concerns second-wave feminists have expressed regarding The Vagina Monologues would seemingly apply to Yoni Ki Baat. One might ask, does such a focus on sex positivity too easily equate sex with power? Do performances like these inadvertently promote the sexualization of women or do they open the parameters for feminist activism? Do they address the politics of sex, sexuality, and sexual violence at a systemic or institutional level? Or do they value personal empowerment over collective social activism? These certainly are interesting points to consider.
Madison Yoni ki Baat performance. Photo credited to Madison Yoni ki Baat directors.
However, I will argue that such claims become problematic when they are considered with an understanding of South Asian and South Asian diasporic cultural contexts. As Gupta (2001, 3–4) points out, in South Asia, there has been more than a “conspiracy of silence” regarding sexuality. For example, the discourse management of female bodies was crucial to several political projects, from British colonialism to Indian nationalism. These discourses continue to find purchase in conservative communities in the diaspora. Given these historical legacies for South Asian American women, developing a space to discuss sexuality in positive and personal ways may be crucial to a feminist agenda.
In addressing needs of local communities, I believe South Asian Sisters’ work also suggests that performance offers us important ways to be-with-others. These are ways that create time and space for talk and deliberation about the problems we face in public and domestic spheres. Theater provides opportunities to envision new ways that justice, equality, peace, and democracy might take root and flourish in our everyday lives. It holds the potential to create moments in which people, as part of an audience, can connect emotionally with those around them. As Dolan (2005) aptly notes, “performance creates ever-new publics, groups of spectators who come together for a moment and then disperse out across a wide social field, sometimes (hopefully) sharing the knowledge they gained, the emotions and insights they experienced at the theater” (90).
My exploration of these concerns begins with a spotlight upon the origins of the Yoni Ki Baat movement, focusing on South Asian Sisters’ advocacy work and its connection to other South Asian American feminist projects. To reflect upon the potential of Yoni Ki Baat, I then offer an ethnographic account of a specific performance by a South Asian American feminist activist and scholar named Roopa Singh.3 Taking place in 2006 at Club Ambrosia in San Francisco, her spoken-word poem addresses the topic of sexual violence in the family and makes visible in the public sphere what has often been considered unspeakable, even in the private sphere, in South Asian communities (Dasgupta 2007).
Roopa makes calls for acknowledgment through a riveting spoken-word poem that features an eclectic style blending Hindi and English languages, hip-hop and Sanskrit form, as well as events and figures from the Mahabarata and her personal life. Her calls for acknowledgment extend to her relationship with the audience—drawing them closer, in a call-and-response exchange after revealing particularly difficult details about her experiences of sexual violence. “Are you with me?” she asks. Then audience members are called upon to respond, “Yes, I am.” It seems to me that within this dynamic movement a reluctance to publicly address and support survivors of sexual violence is challenged by a public experience of what I call “passionate acknowledgment.” That is, passionate acknowledgment within this performance supports both a relational space and a space in which to explore questions of relationality. Working within this framework, I ask how performances, like Roopa’s, may constitute affective networks of social relations and contribute to “intimate citizenship” (Pollock 2005). Finally, I conclude by focusing on the proliferation of Yoni Ki Baat performances, especially in the Midwest. In particular, I look at attempts to balance creating a strictly South Asian American event, as opposed to women who are interested in creating more of a multiracial forum.
As I mentioned in chapter 1, in 1995, I began working with two small autonomous women’s organizations in Gujarat, India—Sahiyar and Olakh—who use street performances to address issues like domestic abuse, dowry death, or sex-selection abortion (Garlough 2007, 2008). I wondered if similar performance practices were used by South Asian feminist groups in the United States as ways of advancing progressive political agendas. My investigations led me to San Francisco and the South Asian Sisters. Founded by Mauli Daas in 1999, the South Asian Sisters is a grassroots collective, comprised of a diverse group of politically progressive South Asian American women and dedicated to empowering the South Asian American community “to resist all forms of oppression through art, dialogue, conscious alliances, and grassroots political action” (http://sasisters.blogspot.com/).
In several respects, they share commonalities with many of the South Asian women’s organizations that arose in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States like New York’s Asian Indian Women in America, founded in 1980 or New Jersey’s Manavi, founded in 1985. These early activists often had high levels of education, professional accomplishment, and economic resources. Frequently their mission began with a rejection of dichotomized notions of tradition and modernity and a challenge to mainstream feminism (Das Gupta 2006). Moreover, these groups understood the importance of political partnerships. As a result, they were open to male participation and alliances with other progressive groups across ethnic and racial lines. For most groups, their areas of interest revolve around advocacy work that approached women’s issues (domestic abuse, age inequity, civil rights struggles, immigration law reform, etc.) from a gendered perspective.
These leaders were often skilled orators, and used literature, art, and scholarship as their medium of expression. Focusing on local community issues, with an eye toward the global, these women’s groups sponsored film nights, concerts, dances, and community forums. In this effort to build their own feminist agenda, they showed the ways gender intersects with colonialism and social and economic hierarchies, and aligned themselves theoretically with Third World women’s movements and women of color in the United States (Maira 2002). Consequently, the coming together of South Asian feminism and progressive South Asian communities in the United States was not chance. Rather, these organizations consciously drew attention to the ways South Asian women’s feminist agendas grew from and moved among cultures. As Madhulika S. Khandelwal (1995) notes,
For a long time, Asian American women have been depicted like other American immigrant and minority women, as having linear stories of empowerment after arriving in the United States. According to this perspective, women in Asia are uniformly subservient and powerless persons who learn to struggle for women’s rights because of their being in a Western society. Such an approach not only treats gender in Asia in an ahistorical fashion, decontextualizing it from socioeconomic and political changes over several millennia, but also ignores the complex realities of immigration, racism, sexism, class, and cultural issues faced by minorities in the United States. (351)
These general features of South Asian women’s organizations are certainly apparent in the South Asian Sisters’ work. As their name suggests, the group works toward constituting a feminist identity that reflects a productive tension between feminist notions of “sisterhood” and multiple sites of South Asian American identity. “Rather than assuming an enforced commonality of oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together. Diversity and difference are central values here—to be acknowledged and respected, not erased in the building of alliances” (Mohanty 2003, 7). Indeed, the name itself is meant to produce certain rhetorical effects, calling attention to its own use. As Vandana Makker, a founding member of South Asian Sisters, told me, their choice of the word “sister” is meant to evoke a figure of friendship, as opposed to references to an androcentric ethnic, religious, or national group. Yet, the name also works rhetorically to gesture toward their positionality as South Asian.
Moreover, as another South Asian Sister named Anjali commented, this choice also emphasizes the ways that women are always divided by issues related to race, class, and cultural norms. It provokes inquiry into second-wave feminist contentions that “sisterhood is global”—a perspective that has been critiqued as a form of essentialism that assumes homogeneity among a diverse group of women. Instead, South Asian Sisters grounds its work in a commitment to embracing multiple ways of being “a woman” or “sister” that refuse containment within a fixed category—a sense of community and political activism that advocates for a future based upon respect through care. This works to keep the question of “sisterhood” or “South Asian” provocatively open in ways that contribute to a politics of reflection.
South Asian Sisters is about providing a safe space for Desi women to express their desires, frustrations, and whatever else makes them who they are as individuals. We have a book club, we have performances, we have lunchtime discussions and workshops, we have political and social campaigns, and we are open to having much more. Perhaps most controversially, we have rage. Certainly not all of us get worked up about the same things, as was probably best reflected in this year’s production of Yoni ki Baat. Many of the pieces seemed to conflict with each other: what some women found deeply offensive, others embraced and reclaimed, and yet others thought to be relatively trivial. That diversity is what makes us whole, human, and multi-dimensional. There is no singular identity for a “South Asian Sister.” But what does unite us is a common struggle to find empowerment as South Asians and as women. We, along with our Desi brothers, stand up against atrocities committed against our community—whether they be political repression, racism in general, or stereotyping in the media. But we, as Desi sisters, also stand up against atrocities committed against women—whether they are committed by the government, by the media, or, or more tragically in my opinion, by our own brothers. (http://www.southasiansisters.org/)
South Asian Sisters’ political outreach work also involves occasional public-speaking engagements, discussion and reading groups, as well as an active Web site and blog where interested audiences can chat about everyday issues important to the South Asian community and network with other politically oriented groups. For example, in their political work, South Asian Sisters has collaborated with local groups such as Trikone (an LBGTQ organization for people of South Asian descent), or Narika and Maitri (groups that support victims of domestic violence in the South Asian community). They also join forces with national groups that engage in social justice and human rights campaigns. In the spring of 2006, South Asian Sisters joined with SAALT to campaign for immigration law reform. On their Web site, South Asian Sisters issued public statements detailing their belief that immigration reform is absolutely necessary to protect against civil rights violations (April 6, 2006). Through this statement, they publicly aligned themselves with other South Asian progressive groups like Adhikaar (New York), Desist (San Francisco), Desis Rising Up and Moving (New York City), Manavi (New Jersey), Raksha (Atlanta), South Asian Progressive Action Collective (Chicago), and South Asian Network (Los Angeles) to engage in what Monisha Gupta characterizes as unruly behavior. In this way, each year South Asian Sisters has grown to meet the emerging needs of community. Together, these organizations “simultaneously address the inadequacies of the state, their communities, and the larger social movements of which they are a part” (Gupta 2006, 9).
Yoni Ki Baat is a central piece of South Asian Sisters’ activism. It features an original and ever-evolving script that is written and performed by South Asian women from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. Inspired by the first South Asia performance of The Vagina Monologues, which took place in Bangalore, India, in 2002, it has sought to provide “groundbreaking, moving, and passionate” performances from diasporic perspectives. Certainly the ability of feminist performance to create social change in local communities and the broader public sphere has been the subject of academic debate. In her book Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and Performance, Dolan (1993) wonders about the efficacy of collective, grassroots feminist theater. Many would argue that few movements in contemporary theater have been as significant as feminist theater (Case 2008). However, Dolan expresses concern that perhaps grassroots feminism and the theater it inspired in the 1960s “can no longer communicate in a postmodern era that deprecates the local while appealing to some superficial imperialist sense of the global through communication technologies” (14). In this historical moment, she rightly questions whether local or grassroots theater performances provide an alternative sense of the global in a way that contests the often essentialistic representations found in mass media environments. She also worries that “too often political theater work either seems hopelessly nostalgic or naïve, or it can’t adequately address the multiple sites of oppression at which any radical politics has to work” (14).
For those interested in alternative forms of local political activism, these are certainly legitimate concerns. Indeed, they are the very concerns that have stimulated South Asian Sisters’ production of Yoni ki Baat for the past nine years. Through their annual performance, this grassroots feminist organization seeks to confront social issues at a local level, reaching across multiple sites of oppression related to gender, sexual orientation, race, class, and national affiliation. It has done so while providing alternative representations of South Asians in America that are unavailable through mass media, and by offering perspectives from the margins of the margins. In so doing, they have gained a sizable following, drawing audiences in the hundreds.
It seems to me that one of Yoni ki Baat’s important contributions is the way that it implicitly addresses postcolonial feminist critiques of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. With the permission and support of Ensler, the South Asian Sisters “took the underlying messages of that show: women’s rights, female sexuality, voicing the taboo in a quest to end domestic violence, and made it personal to our South Asian community” (Assisi 2007, 1). To understand why this critical appropriation is significant, one must grasp the mission and scope of Ensler’s project. At its core, The Vagina Monologues is a series of first-person narratives in which women reflect upon their relationship to their vaginas, often connecting it to sexual experience and gender identity. The scripts are a mix of fictional narratives that often rely heavily upon extended verbatim quotes from Ensler’s interviews with more than two hundred women about their sexuality, sexual practices, and experiences with sexual violence (Ensler 1998). In these performances, audiences encounter a range of voices, distinguished by age, race, ethnicity, region, class, and sexual orientation. The monologues seem to be grounded in the consciousness-raising practices found in the second wave of feminism in the 1960s.4
The power of The Vagina Monologues also stems from its explicitly political stance on violence against women. Across the globe, the script is performed annually near Valentine’s Day to raise awareness about various forms of violence and generate funds for domestic abuse hotlines, women’s shelters, and feminist organizations. For example, proceeds from V-Day in India are used by women’s organizations to confront, “domestic violence, female infanticide, acid attacks, and dowry related deaths” (http://www.vday.org).
These performances also facilitate outreach and seek to build bridges between Western and Third World feminists. For instance, in March 2004, Eve Ensler, Jane Fonda, and Marisa Tomei joined a cast of Indian and Pakistani actresses for eight sold-out shows of The Vagina Monologues and Necessary Targets in Himachal Pradesh, Mumbai, and Delhi.5 Still, despite all the popular acclaim attributed to The Vagina Monologues and the political work in which it engages, serious critiques have been raised regarding both the performances’ form and content (Frueh 2003).
In terms of form, some feminist scholars express concern about the monologue as a rhetorical option. For example, Christine M. Cooper (2007) argues that through monologues audiences are offered what appears to be “direct access” to voices and experiences, while this certainly is not the case. Moreover, she expresses concern that, “in both their form and their content, the monologues reduce their speakers to versions of the same, whatever the patina of diversity adorning their surface” (729). This critique relates not only to essentialism in terms of sexual orientation and practices, but to race and ethnicity as well (Bell and Reverby 2005). For instance, some have argued that within The Vagina Monologues, alternative forms of sexuality are excluded or treated superficially. Rather than explore these alternatives, the philosophy of sex positivity is used for its commercial value and made generic in its orientation. In this process, consciousness-raising becomes a rite of passage that ends when the curtain closes, rather than being a prelude to talk. Others also contend that there is not enough diversity in terms of voices from the Third World. As Meiling Cheng (2002) notes, “It is intriguing to consider how the ‘vagina experiences’ of 200 mostly American women might speak to women as diverse in origins as a Masai village in Kenya, Paris, Beijing, as the V-Day Web site proclaims. In TMV and V-Day, the anatomical female body—encapsulated in the vagina—is proclaimed as the universal site for women’s solidarity regardless of class, ethnicity, and religion. As such, the diverse experiences of women become essentialized” (327). As Ayeshah from the Madison, Wisconsin, Yoni ki Baat observes,
I had the opportunity to participate in the UW Madison production of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues in 2006. I was given the role of an Iraqi woman who had her face destroyed in the U.S. bombings. I accepted the role because I wanted to make a statement about the U.S. invasion of Iraq and how detrimental it was to the daily lives of the Iraqi civilians, especially women and children. I realized however, that my monologue did not feature the voice of the Iraqi woman herself, but that of her father. I don’t remember the exact lines, but I remember that the monologue was written in third person. Eve Ensler was observing the father who hated his daughter because he could not marry her off now that her face was destroyed. The line went something like, “he hated the planes, which dropped fire from the sky, he hated the soldiers … but right now, he hated his needy, helpless daughter more.” There were two other cast members who were women of color. They performed monologues featuring a Pakistani woman whose husband burns her face with acid and a Mexican maquiladora. Both these monologues did not foreground the voices of these women. Instead, the Pakistani woman’s monologue is in her husband’s voice. It shows how he hates his wife and in a fit of anger, beats her mercilessly with his belt and throws acid on her face. In the maquiladora’s monologue, Ensler imagines where these women have disappeared. There is another optional monologue about an Afghani woman … titled “Under the Veil.” I was actually angry after reading that piece because it further exoticizes these women, giving them no agency. Again, Ensler imagines how it must feel like being hidden and oppressed behind the veil. I read Ensler’s monologues through the lens of South Asian postcolonial literature, especially Gayatri Spivak’s writings, except in this case, Ensler was the Western woman trying to save third world women from their men. It is not that patriarchy does not exist. It does and I am a staunch defender of women’s human rights. But Ensler’s focus on oppression alone makes the monologues a little too one-sided. Where were the voices of third world women, of women of color, of minorities? It wasn’t that they … or rather … we (I count myself in the category) didn’t have a voice, it was just that we didn’t have an organized platform from which we could express ourselves.
Madison Yoni ki Baat performance. Photo credited to Marisa Sarto. Courtesy of Madison Yoni ki Baat directors.
Yoni ki Baat was conceptualized by South Asian Sisters as a reaction to such critiques. Staged annually in university auditoriums or intimate local venues, the performance creates an atmosphere of grassroots community activism, rather than just a theatrical performance. That is, it provides a forum for South Asian American women who are interested in sharing narratives that offer audiences a sense of the diverse ways of being and becoming a South Asian woman. Unlike The Vagina Monologues, each year scripts for the performance are solicited anew through a national call. In addition, scripts from previous years are compiled and kept on file for future performers to access.
The audiences, from the first year onward, have been an integral part of the performance, helping to create the message and the meaning of the event. Typically, one evening is open to the public and at this event spectators tend to be quite differentiated across lines of class, religion, sexual orientation, age, and gender, although most would identify with some form of South Asian heritage. Another evening is often set aside exclusively for women to attend, in the hopes of creating a women-centered space for political and personal exploration. In each case, the dynamic between performers and audience members helps to create the understanding of sexuality that emerges. For example, as Vandana said, “The performances, which were held at the UC-Berkeley campus in July 2003 were extremely powerful in that they brought together the dynamism of the pieces, the performers, and the audience. Nineteen women took turns performing before a five-hundred-plus audience, in a show that broke the barriers our culture often unwittingly creates for us” (South Asian Sisters 2004, 1). The excitement of both the performers and the audience was palpable, observes South Asian Sisters’ member Maulie: “I thought it was overwhelming. It was like we all came out of the closet at the same time—the writers, performers, and the audience. We all were standing up for the yoni, whether it was just by our presence or our serious involvement. I have never, ever been in a more supportive environment on that grand of a scale in my entire life” (South Asian Sisters 2004, 1).
Within Yoni ki Baat, there exists a wide range of poetic forms that vary from straightforward autobiographical narratives to songs to spoken-word poetry. The performances reflect the diversity of experiences for South Asian American women, in terms of immigration/citizenship status, ethnicity, or LGBTQ affiliation. Some pieces are intensely personal and signal a sense of anger or suffering, while others are more celebratory or comedic. These performances tend to revolve around important sites of inquiry to the South Asian Sisters. For example, how does conceptualizing the notion of “woman” necessarily involve an appreciation of the intersectionalities that shape women’s social and political lives? Other sets of questions revolve around traditional South Asian views on gender roles, sexuality, kinship traditions, and arranged marriages and intergenerational conflicts. Consequently, a common concern for exploration involves the ways South Asian American women are perceived as being “at risk” sexually, until they are married. In addition, the topic of sexual violence continues to be at the core of many performances, with concerns ranging from rape to incest. Moreover, there is significant attention to the often-unspoken problem of domestic abuse in diasporic households.
Attending these performances invokes thought-provoking critiques of Western feminist discourse and their theorizing about women from the Global South. For example, while exploring the question, “What is the color of my yoni?” a number of performers simultaneously ask, “Are we really all the same on the inside?” How might we balance the political necessity of forming strategic coalitions across lines of race, class, and nation and a serious consideration of “difference” as we work toward sisterhood? Moreover, what are the effects of discursively creating a singular or monolithic figure of the “Third World woman” that elides the cultural heterogeneity of women here and abroad?
In a related vein, some performances pose questions about diasporic understandings of South Asian sexuality or eroticism and focus upon problems related to the discursive creations of “the exotic Other” and Kama Sutra stereotypes. Other performances are related to inquiries regarding sex positivity and desire—a perspective upon sexuality that embraces consensual activities and experimentation as healthy and pleasurable. In all cases, sexuality is not simply accepted without thoughtful examination; instead, performers explore it based upon their situated cultural perspective. For example, one might ask, “Do you have to love your yoni to be a feminist?”
Indeed, is loving one’s yoni a feminist act? This critically engaging question was posed by Vandana Makker in her 2006 Yoni Ki Baat performance. Her monologue truly explores, rather than simply celebrates, one of the central questions underpinning this event. She begins her performance by stating,
So, anyone that knows me knows that my favorite television show is … (Audience yells “Sex in the City”). Thank you. Yes, that is correct. I watch this show endlessly … So, I was watching the episode where Charlotte, who if you are not familiar with this show, is the prissy, optimistic, romantic one of the bunch. She admits to her friends that she has never looked closely at her vagina. That, in fact, she thinks it is ugly. The other girls are horrified and insist that she take a look at her nether regions immediately. Eventually Charlotte does take a look and she finds herself transfixed. Now even though I think I’m more Carrie than Charlotte, I could definitely relate. I have never looked closely at my vagina. I don’t really find it worth looking at. I too find it upsetting and vaginas in general ugly. And then I couldn’t help but wonder. Do you have to love vaginas to be a feminist? … We have brains, we have livers, we have stomachs. But you wouldn’t find it unusual or unfeminist if a woman found those parts of her body unattractive … Anyway my point is that just because I think vaginas are ugly doesn’t mean that I don’t value them. I do. I’m extremely proud to have one. But you will not find me aiming my pussy in a mirror any time soon …
This is just one example of the critical discourse on sexuality that appears in Yoni Ki Baat.
Without a doubt, the range of discourses is diverse. Some women offer emotional autobiographical testimony that describes their experience of being chastised or physically abused by parents when it is discovered they are sexually active before marriage. Still others celebrate their first orgasm, experience masturbating, or journey to an S&M club. Some explore aspects of their queer racialized body or experiences of giving birth. And others delve into questions that relate directly to women’s experiences in South Asia, such as the connection between sexual violence and nationalism.
Here, I wish to explore, in particular, the role of “passionate acknowledgment” in diasporic life narratives that ask us to bear witness to testimonies of personal trauma. To do so, the next portion of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of Roopa’s performance of “Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse in the Family” at the 2006 Yoni ki Baat. This event was held at Amnesia, a trendy bar in the Mission District of San Francisco. Long before the show was scheduled to begin, the dimly lit performance venue was packed to capacity with a young progressive—primarily South Asian—audience comprised of community members, family, friends, colleagues, allies from Trikone, and strangers. Not surprisingly, the crowd was also, for the most part, women. The performers mingled among the audience, identifiable only by their various red and black outfits that ranged from Indian churidars to slinky red cocktail dresses to black trousers, tank top, and tie. I arrived with my video camera and notebook and took in the scene. Young hipsters with drinks in hand mingled, while the organizers of the event checked the sound equipment and stage set up. Absent any seating, I decided to stand to the side of the stage next to Vandana’s partner who was serving as the event’s photographer. I had heard rave reviews of Roopa’s performance abilities from other South Asian Sisters, so I was looking forward to the show.
Like many South Asian feminists, Roopa describes herself as a performer, scholar, and social activist, making no distinction among these roles. She is connected intellectually to a long line of notable South Asian feminists, like Malini Bhattacharya, who see the “necessary and integral connection between feminist scholarship, political practice, and organizing” (Mohanty 1988, 61). Her contribution to contemporary debates within critical cultural media studies, political science, and feminist theory grows from her grassroots activism on the behalf of marginalized and diasporic communities, as well as her interest in forming strategic coalitions across race, class, and national boundaries. She has been an outspoken advocate—from courtrooms to comedy clubs—not only for immigrant rights but also for survivors of sexual abuse, often employing eclectic performances as a means to draw attention to her cause. As she noted in one correspondence, this eclecticism grows from her experiences in the diaspora. She wrote, “at home and through the funnel of my parents, my life was Indian, Indian parties, bhajans, temples, Indian food, Indian music. At school, with friends, through music and books, and in particular hip-hop, my childhood experiences were influenced by an array of cultures. This duality, broken into so many parts, made for a powerful mosaic. My cultural backgrounds, with an s, all played a role in my childhood experiences.”
In an interview in Chicago, several months after this performance, Roopa told me that she began working as a grassroots advocate with an AIDS foundation at an early age, focusing on harm reduction for sex workers and drug addicts in her local California community. Her developing interest in human rights and social justice issues led her to pursue a law degree at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in First Amendment violations, as well as sexual violence against women. This expertise led her to an internship at National Public Radio in which she was engaged at the Supreme Court. Not satisfied with confining justice work to a courtroom, she created a blog called political poet(ry) where she posts poetry, social commentary, and short essays to respond to current news events from a South Asian feminist perspective. On the weekends, her performances of slam poetry and stand-up comedy draw audiences interested in issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. During the week, her classrooms at universities are filled with students studying politics and culture, and her hip-hop yoga courses draw people interested in self-development and cultural connection.
In this conversation, she commented that this work and its connection to performance is somewhat of a natural choice, as she comes from a long line of conscientious objectors and community advocates:
How I came to do what I do is build bridges and mine for questions … What I do is I share (a.k.a. perform) aliveness to audiences. There is a way that the justice figurehead has functioned as a storyteller and as orator from ancient times to now. My grandfather in India was a lawyer and was also consulted for spiritual guidance, and his ability to fight landowners on behalf of the people. So, how I came to do as I do, well, I’ve always [performed]—even as a child I pretended to teach—and now what I do is teach … as one arm of an overall strategy of building bridges and mining for questions. I feel like in this era it’s crucial that we focus on the creation of questions, more so even than revealing answers. I try to insert the questioning ability or critical eye. (Personal interview, 2007)
While she sometimes regards what she is doing as “performing a lifeline,” she also points out the ways that performance is a fraught word for her. “I don’t like the word ‘perform’; I just think it’s over used … So lately I have been using the word sharing. I think invitation is a beautiful word too, to be able to invite, hosting an experience.” This is difficult work, she maintains, “It’s no wonder it’s hard to be an artist, it requires people to feel, you’re watching a human being practicing being alive in different ways than you are and there are reasons people are alive in all those ways and it’s hard to be one of them” (personal interview, 2007). In order to honor the difficulty of her work, the sensitive nature of the issues at hand, and the depth of the feelings at stake, Roopa and I spent a good deal of time talking about the process we were engaging in together. During visits, over the phone, and in e-mails, we discussed our approaches to activism and art, our families and our future research plans. We talked about my positionality vis-à-vis this research. Did my commitment to feminist pedagogy extend beyond the classroom? Yes. Had I worked in community center contexts? Yes. Was I a survivor of sexual violence? No. What might that mean for our ability to understand one another? Sometimes we disagreed about issues at stake but we seemed to agree upon the importance of speaking one’s truth and actively working to maintain a level of trust and transparency. For example, we explicitly discussed the options for how she wished to be represented—a pseudonym? her first name? or her first and last name? In the end, she chose to use her first and last name.
Often central to the challenges confronting Roopa when she shares her experiences with others from the stage is the very nature of the phenomenon she is sharing—the difficulties of being a survivor of sexual violence. It is a sensitive topic not often addressed in the South Asian community at large but consistently present in Yoni Ki Baat performances throughout the years. The struggle of living with a history of sexual abuse stems not simply from the weight silence or emotional toll takes upon the individual or family. In addition, women often feel that their stories of sexual violence do not merit public notice. As Cvetkovich points out, “Sometimes the impact of sexual trauma doesn’t seem to measure up to that of collectively experienced historical events, such as war or genocide. Sometimes it seems invisible because it is confined to the domestic or private sphere. Sometimes it doesn’t appear sufficiently catastrophic because it doesn’t produce dead bodies or even, necessarily, damaged ones” (Cvetkovich 2003, 3).
By no means is Roopa the only performer to explore these issues. Indeed, the topic has been addressed in almost every Yoni ki Baat performance I have attended. All of these concerns are explored, for example, in Anjali’s 2003 Yoni Ki Baat performance of “Get Your Hands Out of My Vagina”—a personal account that describes a relative who preys sexually upon young women in his family’s household. Everyone knew, she relates, but nobody ever said, “Get your hand out of my vagina.” This silence emboldens him and it was years before anyone was able to name his abuse. So, as Anjali’s eloquent performance concludes, the volume of her voice begins to rise and she shouts into the microphone, “Today I have the courage to say … get your fucking hands out of my vagina.” The audience—filled to capacity with a diverse set of South Asian Americans, as well as other community members and friends—was visibly moved to shock or tears and clapped vigorously as she held their gaze before leaving the stage.
The Toronto-based psychotherapist Smita Vir Tyagi (2007) highlights some of the cultural challenges facing discussion of childhood sexual violence in this diasporic context. “When people talk about sexual molestation by family, they don’t talk about zabardasti, which is ‘force’—a person forced you to do this or that. Sometimes they use a kind of minimizing language like chherchhaar, which means ‘a little bit here and there,’ ‘pushing and shoving,’ playful kinds of things. This language doesn’t allow you to get the sense of how serious and how intrusive it is, and what a deep violation this is” (Poore 2007, 111). With no name for this type of sexual abuse, women and girls are faced with the difficulty of trying to describe a violent event in language that misrepresents the experience as noncoercive sexual play. Those who perpetrate this violence, choosing to gratify themselves at the expense of someone with very little or no power to give or withdraw consent, often take advantage of family connections. This sense of family connection is somewhat different from that in the West, so that in South Asian households, the notion of “family” includes “current and past family friends, frequent visitors to the house, distant cousins, and houseguests who may or may not be biologically related or even closely connected to the family.” Consequently, “children experience ICSA [intrafamilial childhood sexual abuse] in these settings because perpetrators’ access to them is made possible by their access to familiar and familial spheres” (Poore 2007, 107). Equally important, during abuse and in its aftermath, silences prevail because survivors recognize perpetrators as belonging to the very context in which they have experienced violence.
For many South Asian American women, divulging their experience becomes even more complicated due to the cultural stigma associated with inappropriate sexuality, sexual desire, and sexual pleasure. “To talk about sexual abuse without conjuring up images of pain and injury opens the door for all kinds of insidious accusations, including, ‘You liked it, that’s why you didn’t try to stop it’ or ‘don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy it,’ which re-victimizes victims. In many cases, only years after the abuse has stopped, survivors are finally able to articulate why they felt forced into the situation” (Poore 2007, 110). Moreover, protecting the family through bearing suffering in silence is a culturally valorized practice (Das 2007). This silence only further perpetuates the sense within the South Asian American community that incest is not a serious community issue. Indeed, most South Asians react with skepticism when the problem of sexual violence in the family is associated with the community. It runs counter to myths of sexual abusers as strangers, or the mentally ill, rather than the “well-known” perpetrators that are often involved in these types of crimes. “The South Asian immigration story makes no room for images of South Asians as perpetrators of domestic violence or child abuse. Instead, members of the community strive to project a model minority status, which for survivors … conflicts with daily lived reality” (Poore 2007, 117). Indeed, it seems to me this daily disconnect between lived reality and social appearances was, in part, what led Roopa to engage in such activist performance.
At the 2006 performance of Yoni Ki Baat, Roopa not only performed “Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse in the Family” but also took on the role of Yoni ki Baat MC. Taking the stage in a traditional South Asian churidar and sneakers, her presence elicited an immediate and positive response from the audience who cheered wildly and shouted words of encouragement.
Roopa began the program by framing it in terms of testimony and witnessing practices, enjoining the audience members to listen carefully and compassionately to the stories they were about to encounter and know that this respect was going to be returned in kind.
Yoni Ki Baat is important for a lot of different reasons and I want to encourage everyone here to know that we honor you. And that we feel the way that you are honoring us by bearing witness. Anajli used the word diversity. Diversity is kind of a played out word in the Bay Area. Am I right? Am I right? Am I right? (Audience applauds and some shout “Yes!”) But what we are talking about actually is a type of diversity. It’s the many different faces a South Asian woman can have. It’s the many different ways of being creative that a South Asian woman can hold. So thank you for bearing witness to something that we don’t see in mainstream American media. So this in a way is alternative media. So thank you for bearing witness. Get ready for a great show.
The audience clapped loudly in response to Roopa’s opening—both an invitation and a welcome—that laid the groundwork for the potential of resonance between performers and audience members (Wikan 1992). What struck me was the way her words and presence on the stage made a compelling call for the compassion and critical reflection that sought to foster passionate acknowledgment. In this moment, she quite explicitly exhibited care for audience members and illustrated ways that they might acknowledge her as well. This opening was designed to hold the potential for building trust, mutual concern, and connectedness.
In the section that follows, I want to offer the reader a long excerpt from Roopa’s performance of her poem, “Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse in the Family.” As I mentioned in the introduction, such a strategy on my part is meant to keep her voice present and highly visible in this chapter. As I do so, I pay close attention to three central issues: (1) her self-positioning as a diasporic feminist activist and scholar; (2) the ways her diasporic identity contributes to her sense of sexual violence and self-care; and (3) how she reconceptualizes the traditional notion of dharma into a feminist response to violence in the family.
So my name is Roopa. I grew up in San Diego. I was one of three Indians, and I mean Indians, no other South Asians, in a graduating high school class of a thousand. So figuring out my cultural identity has always been a process. Now, right about this moment, many desis in the audience are wanting to ask me, so where were you born? For some reason this question gets asked of me like all the time. Strangers come up to me … like where were you born? … Because it seems to matter. But I don’t really think it does. I think that we all form our cultural identity as we go. So this is one version of one of the stories that I have in my life …
So, as the diasporic daughter currently on stage will you engage in some call and response with me for this piece? Is that okay? (audience responds enthusiastically). So when I say “I am,” will you say “with you,” so that I know that you’re there with me. So let’s give it a try … “I am” (audience responds and replies, “With you,” and Roopa smiles and hugs herself. Audience members laugh and murmur amongst themselves).
This piece goes out to Birjinder Anant RIP. (Audience applauds.) And I am doing this in the name of not keeping silent. Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse in the Family. A nice light topic. (The audience laughs.)
How the reasons birthed, learned to fly in to fill in the blanks, and how it could happen. Or why it could happen. How the reasons flew in to tell me how it never happened. Land mine memories glint in the sand. At twenty-eight years old, about to be twenty-nine, I still uncover clues of what was going on in their mind when they did it. Did me. Undid me with a most unfortunate torture.
Reasons. She’s American. She was born here, so it’s different for her. American girls don’t have honor to begin with. Right? They always want sex. It’s not rape. They like it. American girls may look Indian sometimes but they’re always American on the inside. And American girls don’t feel. Reasons. Reasons fly in to fill in the blanks. And even now I find my father pausing when I speak to him in Hindi, and I myself pause before I speak to him in Hindi. I pause because wrapping my tongue and my lips around Hindi feels different, sensual in a different way, and I am aware of my mouth, I am aware of my language. And I am always really aware of not wanting to do anything that could turn him on. He pauses every time I speak Hindi … He pauses every time I utter more than a Ram Ram or a Gita ji …. He pauses in utter surprise because it makes me more human to him. He forgets every day that I speak and understand his mother tongue. His mother tongue.
My mother tongue. Was forked. It split in two ways. I call her ma. My mom wasn’t told much about her culture either. Maybe it was only the men in her Brahmin family that really got to love learning. Maybe caste like class varies within families. Maybe she was treated like a Dalit girl by her Brahmin family and had to pick over her brothers’ leftovers. Like I did. Leftover stories, leftover instruments, leftover cultural cues. Even though my mom was born and raised in India, she gets on Google just like me to find the specific meaning of Holi. (Audience laughs.) But she does know every bhajan in the whole fucking world. (Audience laughs.) And as long as you’re not her daughter, she’d be willing to teach you some bhajans too. But she won’t hardly teach me. “I am.” (Audience responds, “With you.”) “I am.” (Audience responds, “With you.”) …
My mom has been jealous of me in an unnatural way. Palpable sometimes so thick in the air it makes me nauseous, cut myself gross. My dad loves it when she sings. So singing, that’s her turf. So I still don’t. And at least in that way, I know I’m being a good daughter.
(Lesson from the Mahabarath): White horses thunder a steady gallop. Wind whips time through the tendrils of their manes. The great beasts shoulder a golden chariot running it across the epic tale of a land planted with rows and rows of soldiers. Two sides. Impending battle. Arjun turns to Krishna. Chin trembling, eyes bouncing in time to the beat of the horses racing underneath them. Hey Krishna. Do you understand? Either way, I face unbearable loss. Either way. There’s no way out. No matter who wins, we all lose.
Krishna was beautific in his compassionate state, eyes lay low, lashes curled out to meet the blue sky. Lips turned dark with truth’s passion. Hey Arjun. Understand? Do I understand? Yes, I understand. And no there is no understanding. All you can do is do what you must. Do. Proceed in battle and don’t give up on life …
My impression was that in her performance, Roopa is careful to situate this sexual violence within the diaspora. She argues that the “reasons” offered for being sexually assaulted have much to do with immigrant identity and the way one appears within their own community. These reasons, she notes, are about how she is perceived to occupy an “either/or” identity. “Inauthentic” or “tainted” cultural identity becomes an excuse for making sexually violent behavior acceptable. In this process, she is “Othered” beyond recognition. Until, of course, she speaks in Hindi and is seen as “more human” because she can speak and understand this mother tongue.
What struck me was that Roopa not only addresses these “reasons” in terms of her use of Hindi. She acknowledges that her understanding of Indian culture is, to a certain extent, limited. Although she enjoys singing, she does not know many bhajans. Although she likes to participate in Indian festivals, she does not know the meaning of Holi. Yet, she stresses that even her mother does not possess a perfect knowledge of Indian cultural traditions (even though she was born there), and offers a critique by suggesting that such knowing may have more to do with family culture and gender roles.
What interests me most are the ways that Roopa critically plays with the Hindu epic the Mahabharata to address “women’s issues” in ways not unlike what women have done and still do with folk tales, legends, and epics in India to this day (Garlough 1997; Mills 1985; Narayan 1986; Richman 1991). The Mahabharata is one of the longest epic poems, at over 100,000 verses and eighteen books. It explores basic human concerns with personal motives, sensual gratification, sexual fulfillment, righteous duty, virtuous behavior, and the path to liberation and salvation. Roopa references the part of the Mahabharata called the Bhagavad Gita, which comprises just a few hundred verses, but is viewed by many as a distillation of Hindu philosophy. Translated as Song of the Divine, it is told from the perspective of Lord Krishna as he advises Arjun on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, just prior to the start of an eighteen-day war. Looking at a battlefield where both sides are lined with family, friends, and teachers, Arjun begins to weep and feels a deep sense of moral confusion. He is loath to fight the people with whom he has close relations—despite their tyranny—for a kingdom he does not particularly want to rule. He feels it might be better to simply give up his weapons and allow himself to be killed because to destroy his family would be the greatest sin of all.
Eventually, Arjun throws down his weapon and refuses to fight. At this point, Krishna and Arjun begin a dialogue in which Krishna advised him to follow the path of right action, knowledge, as well as devotion. The Gita ends with Krishna telling Arjun that as a leader it is his duty to fight for his kingdom absent any personal desire that would lead him to worry about the end result or future consequences. In doing that, the balance of good and evil will be restored, Arjun’s dharma will be complete, and by providing selfless service. Arjun understands this and proceeds into battle. For many Hindus, this narrative offers a seminal lesson regarding how to face the struggles of life, live within complicated relationships, do our duty, show leadership, and offer selfless service.
I was struck by the way that Roopa masterfully used the Bhagavad Gita as a vital rhetorical and hermeneutic resource and through it figured herself in ways that provides important insight into how she understands the difficulties of being a survivor of sexual abuse. Specifically, what intrigued me was her skill in appropriating key figures and elements of the Bhagavad Gita’s plot. Just like Arjun, who finds himself in the impossible situation of having to battle his own family, Roopa acknowledges and asks the audience to acknowledge the “unbearable loss” she is facing. There exists simultaneously a deep love for family and a sense of duty to herself and other survivors—a need to battle what is “right.” In the end, “no matter who wins, we all lose.” Her answer—like Krishna’s—is that all that one can do is what one must do, engage in battle and strive to live a just and good life. In this way, it seems to me Roopa’s performance attempts to deliver a difficult message without covering or explaining away what remains baffling about it. Such play within performance helps sustain the encounter with the Other and provides a pathway to passionate acknowledgment. It opens the time and space for disclosure, as Roopa’s words and body force us to reexamine our assumptions about her, reconsider the categories in which we can easily place her when we do not risk acknowledgment, and recognize her struggles and suffering. That is, such performances offer care through gestures that invite recognition to be compromised a bit in the name of both acknowledgment and inquiry.
In addition, Roopa’s performance addresses silence on two levels: through the visibility of her body, and through poetic discourse that not only identifies a problem and testifies to violence, but offers an account of “a most unfortunate torture.” Her body—eclectic and critically playful in a traditional bindi and churidar paired with a pair of canvas sneakers—helps her to shift and destabilize ethnic identity positioning.
Her presentation speaks to the ease of misrecognition and the fact that visibility is always a negotiated relation between self and Other. This negotiation has two levels: incomplete knowledge the self has of the other and the incomplete knowledge that one has of oneself (Phelan 1993). Roopa draws attention to the fact that she often is misrecognized as someone untouched by sexual abuse just as she can be misrecognized as traditionally Indian in her bindi and churidar until attention is drawn to her “checked sneaks.”
My sense was that Roopa, speaking as a feminist activist, hopes not only to testify to the existence of childhood sexual abuse but also survival. As Ken Plummer (1995) observes, “From many different persuasions, the argument has been made that the stories we tell of our lives are deeply implicated in moral and political change” (144). Members of collective movements use personal narrating to witness forms of terror and trauma, including sexual violence, domestic abuse, political degradation, racism, terrorism, and genocide. Within tribunals and national investigations of human rights offenses, personal witnessing may play a key role in the creation of new rights protections (Schaffer and Smith 2004, 16). Moreover, in Linda Martin Alcoff and Laura A. Gray-Rosendale’s (1996) work on sexual violence, they suggest, “A principle tactic adopted by the survivor’s movement has been to encourage and make possible survivor’s disclosures of our traumas, whether in relatively private or public contexts … This strategic metaphor of ‘breaking the silence’ is virtually ubiquitous throughout the movement … speaking out serves to educate the society at large about the dimensions of sexual violence and misogyny; to reposition the problem from the individual psyche to the social sphere, where it rightfully belongs, and to empower victims to act constructively on our own behalf and thus make the transition from passive victim to active survivor” (199–200).
These acts of bearing witness, like Roopa’s spoken-word poem, have been understood in a variety of ways. First, some see them as a sacred responsibility, related both etymologically and historically to martyrdom (Sommer 1995, 197). To tell a story of suffering and to be heard by others can be gratifying because it allows one to address the significance of their experience. Yet, often it is also painful. As Felman (1992) claims, these memories awakened for a public purpose can also be a “radically unique burden that is characterized by the solitude of responsibility” (3). She points toward the words of Elie Wiesel, who said, “If someone else could have written my stories I would not have written them. I have written them in order to testify. And this is the origin of the loneliness that can be glimpsed in each of my sentences, in each of my silences” (Wiesel 1984, 23). In these moments, the burden of the witness is his or her own, despite any alignment with others.
Second, many scholars argue that these stories, as Roopa does, has some therapeutic value in helping individuals to work through “horror, gain support from their community, and re-affirm their sense of well-being” (Schneider 2002, 42). In many cases, witnessing is thought to provide a means of giving cognitive and emotional coherence to traumatic experience, as well as aiding in the construction and negotiation of personal and social identity.
Indeed, some argue that this witnessing is more of an obligation than an option. For example, Pollock (2005, 4) contends that performance “enacts what Kelly Oliver calls ‘the response-ability in subjectivity’ (139): the sense that the ability to respond (response-ability) that inheres in the obligation (responsibility) to do so defines what it means to be a human self … Beyond storytellers, we are witnesses. We see each other and we (must) see to each other through the performance of witnessing. Any one self is thus ontologically and ethically inextricable from ‘others.’” Moreover, she argues that it is the very dialogic structure of witnessing—grounded in the potential of address and response—that connects witnessing to the performative. That is, to conceive of oneself as a subject is to have the ability to address oneself to another, real or imaginary, actual or potential. Of course, these benefits are tempered by limitations as well. For instance, Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale (1996) have written persuasively about the ways the speech of sexual violence survivors has been sensationalized and exploited. Most often, this occurs in the mass media, in journalistic formats, reality TV shows or fictionalized dramatic accounts. These outlets tend to employ a confessional structure that, as Foucault argued, disempowers the “confessor” and privileges the discourses of the institutional context.
Roopa desires to make clear that survival depends upon social support (an interaction that she hopes will carry forward into the future). Thus, in the initial segments of her performance, Roopa seeks to establish a connection with audience members. Through her gaze and her call for acknowledgment—(“I Am”) and response (“With You”)—she establishes an aesthetic and ethic of ‘being-together-with’ (Pollock 1999) and a sense of relationality. The audience in this tightly packed performance venue played along with enthusiasm with call and response. The volume when they responded “With you …” was almost deafening and a charge of energy ran through the room. One could palpably feel a sense of connection that had not been there moments earlier. In terms of its use in this performance, Roopa stated:
Why the call and response? Well, out of an ancient tradition comes a new era of African-based call and response. It is the fabric of protest marches, of cheerleading, of crowd pleasing, of preaching, of hip-hop, and popular education workshop technique. I engage the call and response to feed myself in the moment and to get the people moving with me through a paralyzing issue. (Personal interview 2007)
It seems to me this call and response is a rhetorical strategy—one that consciously connects her with other women of color—that builds relations between the speaker and the audience. It is an invitation to participate in the emerging performance—to be a party to the creation of the testimony. It is a moral act and an ethical gesture; as Hyde (2006) would argue, in listening and being-with-others we “open ourselves to all that others have to say about who and how they are and what they need in order to be saved from the pain and suffering of Being … help[ing] set the stage for the goodness of acknowledgment” (16). Listening provides the potential for welcome. As the audience listens to the performer and the performer listens to the audience, they are gathered together in a more intimate proximity to one another. As Dolan (2005) observes, such “intersubjectivity extends beyond the binary of performer-spectator (or even performers-audience) into an affective possibility among members of the audience … This moment acknowledges that we all came here to do this, to share our attention, to acknowledge our pleasure, and to hope for our mutual, collective transformation” (42).
Most research on performance and witnessing engages with the theoretical concept of recognition. As chapter 1 discussed, from classical literature to contemporary political thought, recognition is understood as a “social good”; it is a political and ethical aspiration thought to free individuals and societies from prejudice and ignorance (Ricoeur 2004). Indeed, as Markell (2003) notes, “Aristotle famously declared recognition, anagnorsis, to be one of the constitutive elements of the best tragedies. Since then, recognition has been a central concept in poetics and has continued to be an important literary device” (62). Within the field of rhetoric, the noted scholar Tom Farrell, uses the term “passionate recognition” to describe the rhetorical process of recognition that takes place in tragic discourse, from testimony to dramatic performance to eulogy. Drawing primarily upon Aristotle, Farrell argues that, in a general sense, an aesthetic of recognition is a mode of seeing that offers audience members the pleasure of learning (Farrell 1993). That is, audiences find enjoyment in seeing likeness and difference because through this process they obtain information about themselves and the world they inhabit, thus leading to increased understanding. To be truly effective, such recognition must also inherently be related to a feeling of public belonging. He writes, “Where tragedy is concerned, recognition must be accompanied by a sense that one’s self-discovery or knowledge is embedded in the human condition” (117). Most importantly, according to Farrell, passionate recognition grows from “the sense that the power of individual action is finite and this finitude is itself universal” (116). We all are limited in the ways that we can respond to the contingencies of life. Thus, in performance, the depiction of tragic events awakens fear and pity as audience members encounter characters who cause, contest, recognize, and eventually suffer an unwelcome fate. While in real life this suffering would be intensely disturbing, in staged performances, through the rhetorical aspect of the recognition process, these painful feelings are purged. Over the years, similar accounts of the significance of katharsis animated by tragedy have been offered repeatedly in scholarship from anthropology and philosophy to theater and cultural studies (Schechner 1988). More recently, however, critical scholars have offered a different perspective of katharsis. Many interested in resistive performances by marginalized groups have noted that a focus upon katharsis has limited our ability to explore how testifying about suffering through cultural practices often requires audiences to move beyond “fear and relief” to a continued engagement with the tragedy at hand—to connect with another’s pain (and remain with that pain) so that social change might begin (Raheja and Gold 1994).
Building from this perspective, I would like to suggest that the call and response elicited a sense of “passionate acknowledgment”—acknowledgment that takes place in staged performances that employ personal testimony to witness tragic events. In performances characterized by suffering, this “passion” might be understood as one that moves us away from mere katharsis. Rather, passionate acknowledgment may gesture toward a rhetorical aspect of the acknowledgment process that works to help us to engage others through neighborly love or compassion.
“Passion,” as Derrida (2000) notes, has at least seven intertwined meanings ranging from Christian passion linked to a history of human rights and democracy, to the experience of amorous and erotic love, to a form of passion that implies martyrdom and testimony. My sense of “passion” in “passionate acknowledgment” grows from a reading of Arendt’s (1929, 1958) work and her exploration of care, love, and human rights. From this perspective, at its core, care is a kind of motion—a movement toward something. In this movement, care or love has many forms. When propelled by desire or craving it manifests as cupiditas. In contrast, love as neighborly love—or caritas—is a form of care or love that is relational.
I believe calls for passionate acknowledgment in performance contexts, like Roopa’s, help to facilitate just this type of care by connecting us not only to specific people or allowing us to “see” them, but by showing us how to care for people in communities or care for people as part of humanity. Everyone who stands in some relation to myself is included in this order of care. Care demands mutual help for the sake of this connection, rather than for a particular person’s identity—taking note of differences but caring regardless of them.
I find myself attracted to this idea that passionate acknowledgment in performances, such as Roopa’s, helps us to move beyond an us/them or friend/ enemy dichotomy to a more complicated place that values dialogue—where people handle public matters from a perspective in which an opponent is not considered an enemy. Through rhetorical acts of acknowledgment, performers address the problems from the perspective of “care.” Performers like Roopa show audiences how to respond to others’ needs and why they should. They point toward ways to build trust, express concern, and forge connections between people. They encourage people to focus upon their humanity as they make judgments about pressing social matters. In the process, performance may become a way of “being-for others” that creates a context in which audiences engage in ethical listening and exhibit a profound wakefulness toward others, the challenges they face, and the suffering they have experienced.
Therefore, passionate acknowledgment can be understood, in my estimation, as a gift. More specifically, drawing from Mifsud’s (2007) work, I would like to envision the process of passionate acknowledgment in performance “not so much as a gift but as giving.” This giving is an open-ended, reciprocal, participatory process. The performer offers their performance, not only as a means of relaying information about an issue, but also as a request for compassion and an invitation for intersubjective connection. But the offering of the gift appears as a request for acknowledgment that is, as Hyde (2006) argues, a sign that there is something moral happening—something related to the “heart.” In this way, this form of acknowledgment attends to the pathos through which audience members are gathered, so that ethical relationships can be forged, constraints upon conditions for understanding can be overcome, and work toward social change can be started.
To my mind, passionate acknowledgment in performance contexts is fed by a pathos that both offers and requests welcome. Hannah Arendt argues that this welcome “refers to the risky inclusion of another in a shared activity, without reference to her identity, or state of character, or degree of merit” (Markell 2003, 180). Interestingly, in response to Arendt’s reflections, Markell argues that “to welcome someone says more about the welcomer than the welcomed; it represents the slackening of the urge to convert an uncertain activity into a predictable process by setting and enforcing strict boundaries to participation. Equally important, many times it does not necessarily indicate that the welcomer is full of warmth toward the welcomed” (180). However, it does imply a sense of relationality—something that troubles the tensions and distinctions that underlie our understanding of recognition and acknowledgment.
It seems to me this sense of presence and wakefulness allows for Roopa to tell the truth of her existence and enact a mode of self-care as well. The audience, in their response, shows concern for how Roopa is faring—not only with communicating the larger issues at hand, but also how she is managing the difficult work of acknowledgment. Moreover, this “lingering-with” helps her to exceed a confessional structure; she eliminates the expert mediator and creates a context in which it is replaced by a compassionate audience who is invited to understand her as witness, expert, and theorist of her own experience.
In this case, I read Roopa’s admission, “I am in pain” as the conduit through which she is able to escape a sense of inexpressible seclusion. This, of course, does not mean that she will be understood. Yet, as Veena Das (2007) argues, “pain in this rendering is not that inexpressible something that destroys communication or marks an exit from one’s existence in language. Instead, it makes a claim on the other—asking for acknowledgment that may be given or denied” (40). Indeed, a critical engagement with this trauma, Roopa argues, requires vulnerability—a vulnerability that allows for such an approach or encounter. As Roopa stated in one of our interviews, “performance requires people to feel. Practicing ways of being alive in different ways than you are. And it’s hard to be vulnerable …. [So] I don’t want to talk about incest without making sure that people [in the audience] are breathing, without making sure that people know they are in a room together with other people and they’re safe. And I need to get reminded of that too. There is a kind of isolation that comes with torture. It stays with me. So, particularly on stage, it’s a place of connection with the world.” And this, I contend, is a space with the potential to engender passionate acknowledgment.
Unlike The Vagina Monologues, performances of Yoni Ki Baat do not end without any promise of continuing conversations about such sensitive topics. For those who choose to participate, South Asian Sisters offers the Day of Dialogue as a tandem event to Yoni Ki Baat. This occasion is designed to answer questions or further explore issues that may have arisen for audience members and performers during the performance.
The philosophy grounding the Day of Dialogue grows partially out of the San Francisco sex-positivity movement—a movement that advocates a reversal of sex-negative attitudes—as well as an affirmation of a culture that would support and foster the expression of sexual desire. This approach goes beyond simply affirming sex as a set of practices. Rather, it promotes working toward positive conceptions of self as a sexual being, as well as the positive exploration of desire and sex. While the sex positivity movement is directed toward American culture more generally, members of South Asian Sisters have recognized the importance of exploring these issues in the context of the South Asian American community. As Vandana Makker, a former organizer of the event, put it to me in an interview following the 2005 Yoni ki Baat performance, “For many South Asian women, sexuality and desire are difficult to discuss. It is ironic because, as the Kama Sutra shows, sex was considered a real art in places like India. But in everyday life, social norms for women have required us to be modest, sexually naïve or self-sacrificing.” These norms become further complicated in the diasporic experience, with South Asian Americans often feeling compelled to maintain a cultural identity that comes at the expense of desire.
Many times, adolescent girls and women are judged for becoming too “Western” in their behaviors if they are interested in discussing sex or engaging in sexual practices. In families and communities, monitoring sexuality and talk about sexuality becomes a way of sustaining cultural identity. The Day of Dialogue offers a safe space in which to discuss the tensions that arise around sexuality for Desi women. It also functions as a space for women to offer testimony about experiences of sexual violence and provide information about South Asian women’s shelters in the Bay Area.
South Asian Sisters’ Day of Dialogue, held in 2005 at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, California, was the event at which I first became acquainted with several core members of South Asian Sisters and their organization’s mission. This event was devoted to reflecting upon the vocabulary and the topoi South Asian American women use to speak of their own bodies and desires. Sessions at the Day of Dialogue revolved broadly around the two themes of pleasure and violence, and, more specifically, with issues of sexuality, identity politics, law and human rights, violence, and sexual identity. In a session called “Politics and the Yoni,” participants were offered a chance to discuss the ways international and domestic policies shape perceptions of gender and sexuality. As the event pamphlet explained,
Topics of discussion include, but are not limited to policies and reactions that governments and courts make that affect women’s bodies and human rights (reproduction rights, pornography, genital mutilation, rape, prostitution, gay marriage, etc.). We will explore the representation of minority groups in politics and exchange inspirational stories of resistance to learn about strategies for community organizing and for defending our human rights.
Here, women are enjoined to go beyond simplistic modes of consciousness raising. Instead, the goal is to reach a place of talk that provides space allowing for divergence and dispute—a space that confronts its own plurality. For example, in the session, “Nurturing the Yoni,” participants explored the potential of sexual desire through discussions of masturbation, fantasy, pleasure, sexual relationships with others, as well as sexual health. In “Violence and the Yoni” leaders provided a safe, confidential space to share experiences of violence, ask questions, and gather resources. Participants were encouraged to “learn more from each other about the disturbing epidemic of violence that girls and women face too much in their relationships (parent/ child, same-sex relationships, spousal) and how this violence is justified and perpetuated by many of our institutions” (http://sasisters.blogspot.com). Through experiences of witnessing and testimony, women were encouraged not only to build solidarity in a safe space but also to deliberate upon what they might accomplish through community work and political advocacy. The Day of Dialogue concluded with an opportunity for “Open Sharing” in which women performed life narratives, poetry, songs, and readings together—a space and time of artistic testimony and witnessing organized to facilitate both personal growth and political action.
As events like Yoni Ki Baat or the Day of Dialogue suggest, they are willing to build upon “old bones” of sisterhood and feminism to gain attention for issues that intrigue, anger, or delight them. Yet, they also are not troubled by the process of critiquing the work of second- and third-wave feminists and inventing new ways of approaching exigencies or events from a diasporic feminist perspective.
Across the country, new productions of Yoni Ki Baat are forming. From Chicago to Ann Arbor to Madison, these women are beginning to work together to create time and space that allows for political discourse to emerge, creative invention to be nurtured, issues to be debated, feelings to be expressed, friendships to be formed, and diverse groups of people to be passionately acknowledged. For example, Swati from the University of Wisconsin-Madison noted:
I have spent the last couple of years (specifically within a university setting) organizing around multicultural womyn’s issues. However, after spending a majority of my time growing up on stage and two years running and working on the staff of a multicultural art and literature magazine, I still didn’t feel like I was in a space or context that really embraced my identity as a South Asian womyn. I spent almost all of my time studying, researching and creating platforms for marginalized communities to explore the intersections of their different identities and voices, but I just couldn’t do the same for myself. Working within a system where Black, Native, East Asian and Latina womyn (of various sexual, socioeconomic and abled backgrounds) have historically been oppressed, I wasn’t sure where my experiences as a second generation Indian womyn fit in. I tried to pick and choose, like, doing Vagina Monologues and then helping organize a workshop for Asian-Americans, but it felt forced. I was always fighting for struggles that didn’t really feel like they were mine. And then I found Yoni Ki Baat. In almost eight years of performance, and a lifetime in the Midwest looking for a politically active community of South Asians, I found the perfect marriage of the two in UW-Madison’s production of YKB. Not only was it an effective grassroots approach to dealing with social justice issues, but the first-person narrative in many of the pieces (written and performed by the womyn) were found to be even more engaging to the audience than Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monolgues (which I had performed in just a few months earlier). Our two nights of performance were part of the best show I have ever been involved in. As every womyn took the stage and shared some of her most intimate, funny and heart-wrenching stories I was proud, embarrassed, and just as hurt as they were, because every single one of those ladies were my sisters and talking about problems in our communities. (Personal Correspondence)
Madison Yoni ki Baat performance. Photo credited to Madison Yoni ki Baat directors.
Ayeshah, founder and director of Madison’s version of Yoni ki Baat, elaborates further by relating the following account:
I directed Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues in 2007 and found myself becoming boxed into a specific ethnic category … Bosnian, Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani … and interestingly, all these monologues talked of sexual violence. I could not perform The Vagina Workshop or My Short Skirt or The Little Coochie Snorcher because I wasn’t “authentic” enough. Did Arab, South Asian, and Afghani women not experience sexual pleasure or desire? I remember all-women gatherings in my childhood where my grandma, aunts, mom and neighborhood aunties would discuss everything from what kinds of sexual positions to adopt if one wanted the birth of a son or daughter, to their unique methods of birth control to the ways in which they could make themselves more desirable to their husbands. I remember the women only gatherings as being confined to certain spaces … rooms where men were not allowed and where they did not even bother or dare to intrude. Some aunties were so blatantly sexual that I would feel embarrassed. Once, I remember one of the aunties disclosing an embarrassing sexual secret about her husband to the other women. At that moment, the husband knocked on the door saying that he was ready to go home. He hadn’t heard the conversation, but we all stopped dead in our tracks for a moment. Then everyone exploded into wild laughter. The poor man was perplexed because he couldn’t understand what was happening. Little did he know that his wife had disclosed something personal about him to the rest of the women. Anyway, long story short, I wanted to organize a platform where women of color could narrate their own stories.
Yoni Ki Baat was like an answer to a prayer. I was doing my fieldwork in the Bay Area back in 2008 and stayed for a few days with some South Asian gay friends who were members of an LGBT group called Trikone. Trikone had organized an event called Kulture Kulcha, where I first saw a performance of YKB by the South Asian Sisters. I was immediately drawn to it and later got in touch with Vandana, one of the South Asian Sisters. I obtained the rights to organize something similar in Madison … and the rest is herstory! The first year that we performed, we had a cast member, Farah, who was second generation Lebanese. As the entire cast was South Asian, except Farah, I felt uneasy about YKB’s focus on South Asian narratives not being sensitive to her ethnic identity (which was important to her). The next year, two previous YKB cast members—Amberine and Borna—came on board. We decided to experiment with the idea of making YKB a multiethnic vagina monologues. Our cast members included Hispanic, East Asian, South Asian, African American and African women. Vandana gave me the freedom to experiment with the monologues, for which I am truly grateful. After YKB was a big success in its second year, other women approached. They were not women of color, but they too had stories to share. So Amberine, Borna and I, and later Nathalie, heavily debated over whether YKB should be based on ethnicity or something else. We were all worried about the voices of minorities being marginalized again if primarily “white” women auditioned. Yet, we did not want to exclude women just because they were “white.” I suggested that we focus instead on experiences of exclusion and privilege. I think we all face exclusion and privilege in different ways because of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, class etc, etc. With a name like Yoni Ki Baat, my hunch was that more South Asian or women with South Asian connections would be attracted anyway. But I think that at least 70–75% of the cast members should be women of color. My purpose behind YKB is not to give women a voice. They already have it. I see myself as a medium … someone who can help channel those voices to others who would benefit from their experiences. I see YKB as an instrument of empowerment. It has been for me, at least.
In many senses, this is no utopian endeavor—these groups are small with scant resources and dauntingly complicated agendas. However, it would be too critical—in that occasionally overly zealous academic fashion—not to allow for the utopian possibilities growing out of the dedication and energy they bring to their efforts. As Dolan (2005) writes, “I see and write about performance with the hope for what it can mean politically, but also affectively, through my faith that emotions might move us to social action. That is, I believe that being passionately and profoundly stirred in performance can be a transformative experience useful in other realms of social life” (15). Her faith in the political potential of performance is one that I share. I believe that performances like Yoni Ki Baat offer us important ways to be-with-others—ways that create time and space for deliberation about the exigencies we face in public and domestic spheres. Theater also provides opportunities to envision new ways that justice, equality, peace, and democracy might take root and flourish in our everyday lives. It holds the potential to create moments in which people, as part of an audience, can connect emotionally with those around them. Lastly, the spectators of such performances produce ever-new publics—people who come together briefly and then move out again into the public sphere, perhaps sharing what they have learned or felt during their experience at the theater (Dolan 2005). This, I believe, is the utopian potential the South Asian Sisters offers audiences through performances that foster passionate acknowledgment.
